Internal Communications Deep Dive - Part 6 of 6

Section 9: Measurement

Key questions:

• How can internal communications prove its own ROI?

• What are the most important metrics to track for internal communications?

Traditional marketing and communications teams have widely established metrics to determine their impact on ROI and measure success. For internal communications, while there are a number of different metrics that can be used to measure success, the lack of a clear link to bottom-line profit has long been a struggle for IC teams. A blog on Smarp outlines this conundrum, “even though measuring the effectiveness of internal communication is the key to running a successful business, IC metrics remain ignored in most businesses. Sales teams track their activities, the meetings they book, the opportunities they create and the revenue they bring. Marketing tracks the website traffic they generate, the inbound leads they create, the number of webinar registrants or newsletter subscribers they generate. Tech teams have their own KPIs as well such as project delivery time, ticket resolution time, speed index or user error rates. But when it comes to internal communication, tracking the results becomes a pain point in most businesses […] When you don't have the data you need to backup your strategy, it becomes difficult to show the impacts of their strategy on the business’s bottom line. As a result, they keep coping with low budgets and struggle to make the case for internal communication.”[i]

Despite this lack of clarity, there are many KPI metrics to track for internal communications. Alert Software identifies the following metrics:

• “Tracking open rates and click rates in email communications.”

• “Counting page views on intranet pages.”

• “Measuring the number of shares, likes and other interactions on your corporate social media.”

• “Determining how many views corporate videos have received.”

• “Utilizing any analytics components of any software you are using as part of your internal communications campaigns.”

• “Sending staff surveys where they are pre-defined answers to choose from”[ii]

While this provides a lot of options for measurements, the real key is ensuring that IC teams are actively tracking the metrics that tie back to the organization’s strategic goals. Interact Software emphasizes this point, saying that “what you measure depends on your type of organization. What does success look like to you? Whatever it is, it determines what information you need to track, and how this helps measure performance […] To determine your ROI, you need to be able to agree on what you’re measuring, how you measure it, and the way you’re going to present your progress. Outcomes like trust, employee happiness, and satisfaction might be difficult to measure. However, these aspirations of the ordinary internal comms team manifest themselves in other consequences like engagement, participation, and a clear understanding of company goals, vision, and culture. These are the targets of an effective internal communications department.”[iii]

As described in the first section of this report, a key for IC teams is using measurements that link to the all-important employee experience and employee engagement metrics. Analytics in HR provides a striking statistic, “The best-known example of an ROI calculation is the case of Best Buy. According to this Harvard Business Review article, a 0.1%. increase in employee engagement leads to a return of $100,000 per shop for the electronics retailer.”[iv] HR teams are typically responsible for managing annual employee engagement surveys. IC metrics can be prominently included in these surveys by measuring KPIs like awareness of different initiatives, connection with leadership and management teams, or understanding of organizational goals.

A conference held by the Advanced Learning Institute in November 2020, entitled “Measuring Your Internal Communications and Employee Engagement”, provided a number of examples for measuring IC. One approach was for IC teams to start calculating ROI based on savings for the company. For instance, IC teams could measure ROI for improvements in productivity. If employees are staying up-to-date with the latest information about the company in a streamlined and efficient way, IC teams could measure those cost savings in work hours saved. Similarly, you could measure ROI around quality. If you did a communications campaign around how to improve quality levels, and measured the error rate before and after the communications campaign, you could derive a rough estimate of value to the business for lowering error rate.[v]

Section 10: Best practices

Key questions:

• What are the companies that excel in internal communications doing?

As a capstone to this report, this section outlines a few best practices in internal communications from a variety of organizations. These strategies reflect many of the principles discussed in the previous sections of this report. All in all, there is no “magic bullet” for internal communications. What is effective for your organization may not be effective for another. That being said, an IC team’s main goals should be to amplify the core goals of the organization, spread a sense awareness and transparency, utilize engaging and collaborative platforms / content types, and provide an opportunity to improve both employee experience and employee engagement.

HSBC:

“The HSBC global communications team transformed the bank’s approach to gathering visual assets – with zero budget. How? They put content creation into the hands of their employees. HSBC’s comms team launched a companywide photography competition asking employees to capture the spirit of HSBC across six categories. The team ended up with more than 6,000 image submissions. HSBC now uses these staff-snapped photos throughout their internal comms materials – in presentations and reports and on the intranet. The bank has saved money on mediocre, impersonal stock photos, and it’s raised the employee engagement bar.”[vi]

BC Pension:

“As part of a nine-year plan to overhaul its business model, BC Pension took an innovative approach to turning overwhelmed employees into change advocates.

BC Pension launched two podcasts: ‘At the Table with Laura,’ a series featuring CEO Laura Nashman chatting with change management experts, and ‘StaffCast,’ a podcast showcasing employee perspectives on the changes taking place.

The CEO-centric podcast was designed to reassure employees that their leaders have a clear vision of where the company is and where it should be going. The employee-driven podcast gives a voice to the people on the front line of change. It helps employees understand how they fit into the grand scheme of things, and it provides a forum for sharing concerns, strategies and personal stories.”[vii]

Stagecoach:

“Stagecoach knows that employee engagement and good internal communication go hand in hand. That’s why they implemented an employee app to effectively reach and enable their biggest asset – their customer-facing workforce. To reach the 30,000 individuals (including 21,000 bus drivers) within their organization, they utilized a mobile employee app, which received phenomenal feedback team-wide. Not only did more than 84% of employees actively use the app within the first week, but Stagecoach saw an overall increase in employee satisfaction too […] Deskless, frontline, and customer-facing workers should be able to access and share information, find the resources they need in the field, and work collaboratively with their in-office colleagues.”[viii]

Wentworth Institute of Technology:

“Like most universities, Wentworth Institute of Technology responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by moving from classroom-based operations to online learning and remote working. That meant significant changes for its three main constituencies: students, faculty, and administrative staff […] The Wentworth Internal Communications team worked closely with the COVID-19 Campus Working Group and the President’s office to source all information for their communications. The team already used Poppulo for internal communications and had an existing process in place for content contribution and dissemination, which they adapted for communications around COVID-19. That process leveraged Poppulo’s scheduling capabilities to organize the communication schedules of multiple teams and consolidate content into manageable numbers of communications […] This personalization allowed the team to adopt a ‘less is more’ approach to their communications: delivering just the information that was relevant to each individual at just the right time. This allowed them avoid ‘spray and pray’ communications that reduce the engagement with – and impact of – the materials being communicated […] The combination of comprehensive information, personalized content and support from the University’s leadership successfully positioned the team’s campus newsletter as the one source of truth for any communications concerning COVID-19 […] This was seen in the increased open rates for communications during this time. Open rates for COVID-19 communications were 15% above normal open rates, and communications from the university President were 57% greater.”[ix]

Thomson Reuters:

“Thomson Reuters found themselves in a bit of a rut when there wasn’t enough importance on innovation and the challenge they faced was getting their employees to fall in love with innovation. That’s where they formed the #dare2disrupt campaign which was aimed to get the business comfortable with innovation. They tried a handful of internal communication tactics – regular team lunches, inspiration sessions, startup bootcamps, innovation challenges and more. By implementing this campaign, they’ve already seen an upturn in the number of requested innovation projects which suggests their internal communication methods helped to get their 50,000-plus workforce to buy-in.”[x]

References

[i] Smarp, Valene Jouany, “How to measure internal communication (IC): best practices & examples”, https://blog.smarp.com/how-to-measure-internal-communication-ic-best-practices-examples [ii] Alert Software, “Measuring internal communications: metrics and KPIs”, https://www.alert-software.com/blog/internal-communications-metrics-and-kpis [iii] Interact Software, Louise Berry, “Measuring internal communications: 7 ways to show your ROI”, https://www.interact-intranet.com/blog/measuring-internal-communications-roi/ [iv] Analytics in HR, Erik van Vulpen, “Measuring employee engagement the right way”, https://www.analyticsinhr.com/blog/measuring-employee-engagement/ [v] Advanced Learning Institute, “Measuring Your Internal Communications and Employee Engagement”, https://www.aliconferences.com/events/measuring-your-internal-communications-employee-engagement-strategies-virtual-nov2020/, conference attended on 11/12/20. [vi] Ragan, Kath McNiff, “14 compelling internal communications campaigns” https://www.ragan.com/14-compelling-internal-communication-campaigns/ [vii] Ragan, Kath McNiff, “14 compelling internal communications campaigns” https://www.ragan.com/14-compelling-internal-communication-campaigns/ [viii] Blink, “The companies nailing internal communication today: 11 inspiring examples”, https://joinblink.com/intelligence/the-companies-nailing-internal-communication-today-11-inspiring-examples/ [ix] Poppulo, “How Wentworth Institute of Technology pivoted to distance learning in a matter of days as COVID-19 spread”, https://www.poppulo.com/customers/a-communications-success-how-wentworth-institute-of-technology-pivoted-to-distance-learning-in-a-matter-of-days-as-covid-19-spread/ [x] CircleLoop, Matt (no last name listed), “7 companies with great internal communications”, https://blog.circleloop.com/companies-with-great-internal-communications